The iris is formed by a process of chaotic morphogenesis, which means that its final structure is randomly derived. As a result every eye is different. Even identical twins, or clones for that matter, have a unique iris in each eye. Iris scans can therefore be used to produce a biometric which will accurately identify individuals. The outlier population—those unable to use iris recognition due to eye or iris damage—is less than 2%, the smallest outlier population of any biometric.
The concept of iris recognition was developed and patented by Iridian Technologies Inc, and their concept patent U.S. Pat. No. 4,641,349 describes the use of the iris to identify individuals. U.S. Pat. No. 5,291,560 describes a method by which a biometric, including the iris pattern of an individual, can be used as the basis of an identification technique.
Briefly, the Iridian technology involves the use of an appropriate camera designed to photograph the iris of an individual user. Proprietary software associated with the camera captures the iris image and checks it is of suitable quality and that it has sufficient iris content to match successfully. This software is designed to operate only for a predetermined time after image capture commences, and the process has to be restarted if a suitable image is not obtained within that time period.
An authentication server stores as records iriscodes which are templates derived from iris images. Each record is stored with an associated customer ID number. When the server receives an image from the software, it confirms image integrity before initiating a recognition process by comparing the received iriscode with the stored iriscode records. When a match is made the server is able to issue the customer ID number of the matched record to a service provider. The match may be verification (1:1 matching) or identification (1:many matching).
The service provider is then able to access its own records to determine the identity of the individual from the customer ID number and allocate rights to that individual accordingly—for instance access rights, or rights to conduct predetermined types of transactions.